Badman, Frank (1943 - 2015)

Born in Dorset, England, on 29 June, 1943; died in South Australia, 26 September 2015.

Migrated with his family to Australia in 1960 after many years of
farming in Dorset, southern England,
first residing in Bowral,
New South Wales.

Frank was
attracted in early
adulthood to the
Australian outback,
beginning work as a
jackeroo in Queensland
from 1961 to 1963
on Sutton Downs
station, Hughenden and
then Galway Downs,
Windorah. Until 1971
he worked on several
pastoral stations in
western Queensland "as a jackeroo,
stockman, headstockman
and overseer", before
moving permanently to
South Australia in
1972, working mainly
on station bores and
dams operating heavy
machinery for a Port
Augusta company.

He married his wife Evan, and had a son in 1980 and spent their first few years of married life in the harsh
outback climate of the remote shores of Lake
Eyre South. The family finally built, and in 1983 moved into, a home in
Marree. In that first year Frank struck up a strong
friendship and collaboration with another
English-bred Australian attracted by the
outback, Shane Parker, who had moved from
Alice Springs to become Curator of Birds at
the South Australian Museum. For much of the next two decades Frank recorded and
published original information on the birds
of the Lake Eyre Basin, which has provided
a sound basis for all future ornithological
research in the region.

Frank's other major passion was the flora.
Through Shane Parker early in Frank's time
on the roads, Bill Barker urged
Frank to
join the long line of volunteer plant collectors with the State Herbarium of South Australia. Over 30 years of collecting from 1978 to 2007 mainly in South
Australia's Far North, on occasions straying
across the border into Queensland or on the
routes to the south, Frank made over 12,000
plant collections. Frank collected largely on his own or with his
family. He only occasionally had the company
of State Herbarium botanists, meeting up in
Marree.

In 1985 Frank curtailed his contract work with
the Highways Department when a change
from hourly pay to payment by load made the
arrangement inviable. After a decade on the roads Frank
was determined to gain employment in some
aspect of biological science. Upon leaving
Marree in 1985, Frank and the family moved to Port Augusta for a brief time before buying
a house nearby in Stirling North. During this
time Frank secured a position as acting Ranger
at Mount Remarkable National Park.

In March 1988 Frank was appointed to the position of botanist at
Western Mining Corporation's (WMC)
Olympic Dam Project at Roxby Downs,
joining the environmental team there, a job
suited to his experience of the Far North. Frank
was heavily involved in monitoring, survey
work and rehabilitation. Frank then sought formal
scientific qualifications. Because
he lacked an Honours Degree, he enrolled
for a Masters Qualifying as a path to his PhD.
Frank researched the occurrence and rate of
spread of alien vascular plants in northern
South Australia to rapidly complete the first
degree and progressed to tackle
his PhD project comparing the effects of
grazing and mining on vegetation in the region. Both degrees were supervised
by José Facelli, with co-supervision for his
PhD by John Conran.

Frank and Doug Lillecrapp of Todmorden
Station
initiated the development of a herbarium
for every pastoral property in the region as
well as for the Soil Conservation Boards. Frank collected the majority
of plants from each property in the District, with contributions from local pastoralists.

While in Roxby Downs his wife Evan was employed
between 1992 and 1997 mounting up to 80
specimens a day and 27,000 specimens in
total. Each reference herbarium was formed
of folders of mounted identified specimens.
The comprehensive herbarium that Frank
and Evan compiled for Olympic Dam was transferred from new mine owners
BHP to Arid Recovery, a joint conservation
venture by the company, the University of
Adelaide, Department for Environment, Water
and Natural Resources and the community, and respectfully named the Frank
Badman Memorial Herbarium. It continues to
inform new generations of outback ecologists
and naturalists.

As an adjunct to this project Frank wrote
a Florula of the District,
which roughly covers the arid region bounded
by the Northern Territory border, Lake Eyre
South west to the Stuart Highway, with
reference to the State Herbarium's collections
and database, as well as broad data covered in
its South Australian Census, it contains very
short descriptions, and lists stations on which
there are specimen-vouchered occurrences. But
particularly informative are the notes under
each species, covering taxonomy, distribution,
biology, and palatability sourced from cited
literature or communications from botanists,
and his own observations and those of the many
pastoralists in the Far North.

Following redundancy from Western Mining in
1999, Frank established his own consultancy,
Badman Environmental.

Reference: See the extensive obituary from which this entry was extracted in the Australasian Systematic Botany Society Newsletter 166 (March 2016) pp 24-31, with many anecdotes and references [PDF]